Foreign governments and international rights groups reacted strongly on Friday
to a Vietnamese court’s Nov. 30 confirmation of the 10-year prison term imposed
in June on jailed blogger Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, calling the rejection of her
appeal a violation of the due process guaranteed by international agreements and
by Vietnam’s own laws.

Quynh, also known by her blogger handle Mother Mushroom, had blogged about human
rights abuses and official corruption for more than a decade.

She had also criticized the government’s response to a 2016 toxic waste spill by
the Taiwan-owned Formosa Plastics Group that destroyed the livelihoods of tens
of thousands of Vietnamese living in four coastal provinces.

Writing in a statement released Dec. 1, Ambassador Bruno Angelet—head of the
European Union’s delegation to Vietnam—said that Quynh’s return to jail
“directly contradicts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to which Vietnam is a
party.”

“The freedoms of opinion and expression are enshrined as fundamental rights
of every human being, indispensable for individual dignity and fulfillment , as
well as [guaranteed by] Article 25 of the Vietnamese Constitution.”

Authorities’ interference with Quynh’s legal team and refusal to allow EU
representatives to observe the court’s hearing of Quynh’s appeal raise
“questions as to the transparency of the process,” Angelet wrote.
“The European Union expects Ms. Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh to be immediately and
unconditionally released,” he said.

'Grieved, indignant'

Barbel Kofner, Germany’s Federal Government Commissioner for Human Rights Policy
and Humanitarian Aid, also called in a statement on Friday for Quynh’s immediate
release, calling herself “grieved and indignant” over the decision by the
appellate court.

Rights groups also spoke out against Quynh’s return to jail, with Human Rights
Watch Asia director Brad Adams saying the blogger’s only crime had been “to
speak her mind and fight for human rights.”
“The Vietnamese government should address her concerns, including freedom of
speech, a clean environment, and the end of police brutality, instead of
punishing her for trying to improve her country.”

The Paris-based Vietnam Committee on Human Rights meanwhile strongly protested
the rejection of Quynh’s appeal, noting that Quynh’s mother and others who had
come to support her at her hearing were assaulted by plainclothes security
agents outside the courtroom.
“This courageous woman’s real ‘crime’ is that of identifying Hanoi’s strategy of
perpetuating a climate of fear, and she is paying a high price for this today,”
the Committee wrote in a Nov. 30 statement.
“Dispelling this fear is the most urgent challenge we face,” the Committee
said.

Predetermined sentence

Meanwhile, a group of 38 Vietnamese rights organizations and concerned
individuals in and outside the country called on Hanoi on Friday to free jailed
blogger Nguyen Van Hoa, who was sentenced on Nov. 27 to a seven-year prison term
for his online writings on the Formosa toxic waste spill.
“Hoa’s sentence was not result of due process of law under the Penal Code, but
was simply a predetermined sentence,” the group wrote in an open letter
published on the web site of the Vietnam Human Rights Defenders.
“What he did was to help uncover Formosa’s crime and support its victims in
bringing Formosa to court, which doesn’t violate Vietnamese law,” said the
group made up of civil society organizations, officially unrecognized religious
groups, and bloggers and activists both in Vietnam and in countries as far away
as the United States, Denmark, France, and Slovakia.

Authorities have been targeting activist writers and bloggers in a months-long
crackdown in one-party Communist Vietnam, where dissident is not tolerated.

Vietnam currently holds at least 84 prisoners of conscience, the highest number
in any country in Southeast Asia, according to rights group Amnesty
International.
Reported by RFA’s Vietnamese Service. Translated by Emily Peyman. Written in
English by Richard Finney.